All Fired Up

The kiln construction would take almost as long as the tunnel, though it wasn't as large of an area that had to be excavated it had to be a lot more accurate and was more complex. In the meantime Angela returned to her daily schedule - with a few alterations.

Each day Angela would wake up, wash herself, eat and carry out her daily tasks: watering the plants, checking on the mixer, planting new trees ect. Contrary to the studying she did before now she made a point to spend about an hour to chat with Lenara, random things such as life on each of their home planets.

After her chat each day, Angela would work on what she would do after the kiln was complete. Most important was the source of fire. She could do things the long way and make charcoal out of wood and burn that but Angela was eager to try out her rune making abilities.

Since she had obtained the metal core, although she still couldn't work with the stronger metals galladium was malleable and so she could mould the metal to her liking and can start working on the inscription table. She looks up the page in the arcanus to refresh her memory and starts to work on the runes. One more benefit of using galladium is that if she makes a mistake it can be erased and redone.

The first rune she starts to write is anima (ævig) this is one of the most basic runes as it is simply three curls extending from the points of a triangle and thus she completes it on her first try. The next rune, flow (hryngâ) takes several attempts as it is more like a Celtic knot than a simple drawing but it is still not too difficult; it is made of a combination of water (wīsse) and motion (møt). The final rune is energy, made from ævig and møt which takes slightly less work than hryngâ.

Now that she had the inscription table completed, her efficiency at drawing runes would be much higher and she would be able to work on her main project: fire. The rune for fire on its own was not useful, it needed other runes to supplement its power before it can channel anima in a desired direction with a strong force.

The runes that Angela would possibly need are fire (ēmbre), heat (hīsse), power (strøn) and time (ørâ). The difficult part of rune making is combining the runes to produce the desired effect. Testing a rune had do be done carefully as any mistake could cause the rune to react in unpredictable ways.

Since she was working with heat and fire Angela decides to create a testing zone with a large blast shield made of dirt though if she had been working with water for example she would want to create flood walls out of something less permeable.

For her first attempt Angela merely inscribes the ēmbre rune onto a small piece of galladium. She triggers it by injecting a small amount of anima before she throws it over the wall. After 15 seconds Angela doesn't see or hear anything so she peeks over the wall to see a small flame about the size of a thumb flickering from just above the rune.

Speechless at how weak the flame is, Angela walks over and retracts her anima, putting the flame out. Her next few experiments are with the ēmbre rune combined with the strøn rune. This produces a wide variety of effects depending on how the runes are combined, sometimes they explode for a brief moment but then are useless, sometimes they are weaker but burn for a long time and sometimes the flame shoots out at an odd angle for no apparent reason.

Erasing the attempts that didn't suit her purpose, Angela makes a record of some of the runes that seem useful such as the explosion and selects one of the middle ground runes for further testing.

With the strength and direction correct, Angela next tries adding in the ørâ rune to alter the duration of the rune. After a lot of failed attempts that decrease the duration or the most odd one yet, altered the speed at which time passed around the flame, she finally had the effect she wanted, having a rune that lasted almost three hours per activation and was reusable. She made a record of the rune before she moved on to her next activity of studying the arcanus.

She had skimmed over the first few pages before but now that she would soon have the means to complete them she decided to take a second, more detailed look. The page after the compass was about inscribing into harder metals. Most inscribers would use a special tool for this, called an inscription quill. Though it was called a quill it was more like a scalpel with a set of runes that allowed it to cut into most basic metals like it is butter. Angela wonders about the possible uses of these runes in other fields, such as weaponry, but continues reading the page.

The tip of the quill had to be made out of a pointed piece of metal that looks like the nib of a fountain pen and it had a body of galladium surrounded by wood. The runes on the body were heat (hīsse), cut (søt) and of course, ævig.

Angela lets out a yawn as she finishes the page, tomorrow the kiln would likely be done so all she had to do was go to sleep to get ready for tomorrow. She climbs into the bed, vowing to upgrade it soon, and falls asleep thinking of the next day.